The right to criticize the government without fear of retaliation is at the core of the Constitution’s First Amendment. Just last week, IJ asked the U.S. Supreme Court to enforce this principle.

Please join us to defend freedom of speech and other vital constitutional rights.

And as you may have seen, the popular satirical publication The Onion recently joined our fight.

It makes sense why: “Ohio Police Officers Arrest, Prosecute Man Who Made Fun of Them on Facebook” sounds like it was ripped right from a parody site. But that’s exactly what happened to Anthony Novak.

Anthony Novak is an aspiring comedy writer. One day while waiting at a bus stop in 2016, he created a parody of the Parma, Ohio, Police Department’s Facebook page—with obviously fake posts. He took it down that same day, but while the page was active, most people online thought it was funny. The local police disagreed. They arrested Anthony, seized all his electronics, and charged him with a felony for “disrupting police operations.” A jury acquitted Anthony of that charge, and he sued the city and two detectives for violating his First Amendment rights.

As The Onion notes in a hilarious friend of the court brief in support of Anthony and IJ, drastic retaliation against parody “threatens to disembowel a form of rhetoric that has existed for millennia [and] that is particularly potent in the realm of political debate.”

Please make a tax-deductible gift today and help IJ show that the Constitution doesn’t depend on whether the government has a sense of humor.

Many thanks,
Scott

Scott G. Bullock
President and General Counsel
Institute for Justice

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